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I appreciate the time that you've taken to do this research! However, the scientist in me is cringing at your methodology, which is a little suspect in a couple areas.

1. In the first study, you pull data from all posts in 2011. But then you end up only using the top 50 posts with the most unique pageviews. Why do this? If you have data for all the posts, use all the posts! You're unnecessarily restricting the variance of the data, which makes it difficult to draw conclusions. The only thing that you can conclude is that social media have a moderate correlation for the top viewed posts. You can't say anything about posts in general, which seems like a more more important thing to investigate. Even a comparison of the posts with the most pageviews vs. the fewest pageviews would offer much better insight into the possible effects of social media. But ideally, use all the data you have.

2. Your conclusion that "social signals are getting stronger" is not justified. In order to make such a statement, you'd need to perform an appropriate test to compare the correlations from the two time periods to determine if the difference is significant. Without this, you risk labelling something as truly different when really it's just due to random fluctuations.

At any rate, now that I've been mean and torn apart the post, let me restate that I appreciate the time you've taken, and I think more research like this needs to be done! It just needs to be done carefully, so that we're not making erroneous conclusions :)